Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.It’s never not going to be funny that after years of hype about crypto-metaverse-subscriptions disrupting web2 incumbents, the backstop to Twitter’s sudden implosion was volunteers recreating Usenet with RSS.
How many years of yellow peril “TikTok AI feeds will steal our children if we don’t surveillance capitalism hard enough” did we have to endure before it turns out a reverse chron is maybe the least bad option for giving us social media that looks more like Wikipedia and less like 4Chan.
Max@bkeegan Though the 4chan-like sections of the Fediverse *exist*. Don’t also underestimate the power of moderation and especially the power of labor. I think that’s the other lesson in this. Social media spent decades thinking labor didn’t “scale” and trying to replace labor with technology. The Fediverse remembered that decentralized labor scales with the network. (Just like Usenet and RSS.) The modern need is moderation tools that enhance labor efforts and not get in their way.
Roger Moore@VATVSLPR @bkeegan Nah, that’s the same problem in different words: labor doesn’t “scale” because you have to pay for it (and train it and manage it and…). Scale, to social media, is just another word for “profit margins at large centralized size”.
The Fediverse still sees moderation labor as something worth paying for, even discounting how much of it is “volunteer”. But it also scales it differently: more moderators per instance/user.
@VATVSLPR @bkeegan The real trick to Fediverse model scaling of moderators has nothing to do with volunteers being that much cheaper and everything to do with spreading the work around. Even if we paid every Fediverse moderator (and we should!) for that labor, there’s a vast difference in quantity/quality between needing to moderate the bounds of one instance (and interacting with neighbors) than trying to manage the firehose of centralized social media with few clear boundaries.